ADVANCED MATERIALS & PROCESSES | JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2025 32 Fifty years ago, in January 1974, I moved to a post-doctoral research post at the University College of North Wales in Bangor, on the north Welsh coast. The project involved making a metallurgical study of all the Copper and Bronze Age metalwork from Wales, and archaeometallurgy has been my life ever since. Here are some thoughts on how the discipline has changed in the years since that first project. EARLY DAYS A fundamental design flaw in the Welsh project was that no one had PERSPECTIVE 50 YEARS OF ARCHAEOMETALLURGY A world-renowned archaeometallurgist reflects on his career within the industry and the technological advancements he witnessed during five decades out in the field and at the microscope. Peter Northover* University of Oxford (retired), Oxfordshire, U.K. *Member of ASM International I was taught how to mount, polish, etch, and photograph a metal sample (a magnesium alloy, as I recall); and I was hooked. It is still the metallography that gets me out of bed in the morning. Back then, two aspects of archaeo- metallurgy dominated: 1) mining, smelting, and refining; and 2) compositional analysis, which tended to focus on the question of provenance, identifying the sources of the metals used. Exploring how people viewed and used the metals they had produced was a poor third aspect. One factor for it being less of a focus in those early days may have been that museums were spooked by the sizes of samples the pioneers of archaeometallurgy took, often 10-12 mm across. This first project established the way I worked wherever possible, using small (<3 mm) metallographic samples and electron probe microanalysis (a metallurgist’s technique to link composition and microstructure). In those days the probe was manually operated, and I could make three analyses on each of four samples in a working day. Today probes are highly automated, and five analyses can be made on each of up to 30 samples in a 24-hour day. My aim has been to quantify and tabulate the metallography so that it can be treated statistically alongside the compositions. Large datasets can be built up rapidly, for example 472 analyses for the Bronze Age site of Zug-Sumpf in Switzerland; worked out how many artifacts there were. In fact, there are well over 2000 pieces of copper, bronze, and gold. So mea culpa, 50 years on and I am still trying to complete it. The metallurgy has been done (about 750 analyses), a text has been written, but I am still trying to complete the catalog. This was a dream job for me. I was first involved in archaeology when I was 15, volunteering for the excavations in Winchester, and I encountered metallurgy between school and university, working at the Westland Aircraft/ British Hovercraft Corp. at Cowes on the Isle of Wight. On my first day there, Dr. Northover on location at Oxfordshire County Museums sampling an Iron Age (1st century BC) mirror.
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